In democratic societies, citizens have the right to know whether their elected representatives
address environmental problems successfully or not. Voters can judge their governments' economic
performance by looking at GDP growth and unemployment rates; equally simple measures for
environmental policies face a number of obstacles, inter alia: the complexity of the policy field
"environment", lack and quality of data, absence of scientific and political consensus on the relative
importance of sub-fields like climate change, waste, biodiversity etc., and the tendency of expert
communities to get lost in details rather than communicating the big picture. This paper will show
ways and define rules how to overcome these obstacles.